Sestak affair an embarrassment but no scandal

Obama, White House giving Chicago politics a bad name

Some of you will probably accuse me of smoking that last stash of primo Hopium trimmed from the Happy Obama Chia head in my office.

Once my head clears, I might accuse myself, too, but only after I search my scalp for the probe with which White House media guru David Axelrod sucked out my brains.

But the thing is, I must agree with the Obama White House in the matter of this Joe Sestak patronage scandal.

There's no scandal, despite the hopes of Republicans and some journalists.

"If I ever thought anything had been wrong about this, I would have recorded it," U.S. Rep. Sestak, the Pennsylvania Democrat, said in a Friday news conference.

He was talking about that conversation with former President Bill Clinton, who'd been sent by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to entice Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary and clear the field for Sen. Arlen Specter.

Specter, for decades a Republican with a spine of boiled okra, realized his own party couldn't stand him. So he flipped, became a Democrat, and gave President Barack Obama the all-important 60th vote in the Senate to stop Republican filibustering.

Obama wanted to protect Specter. And Clinton carried the message: Sestak could remain in Congress and take a fancy appointment to a presidential advisory board.

"I heard President Clinton say the words 'presidential board' and that's all I heard," Sestak said, "… and either intelligence or defense. I wasn't interested. I said no."

Sestak defeated Specter and is his party's nominee for the Senate.

But where's the scandal? It wasn't a payoff, because the advisory appointment wasn't a paying job.

White House counsel Robert F. Bauer wrote in a memorandum that all they were offering Sestak was another way to serve the public.

"There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior administrations — both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals — discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office. Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements."

Naturally, this didn't satisfy Rep. Darrell Issa, a Californian who is the leading Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He has already found the Obama guys guilty.

"The White House has admitted today to coordinating an arrangement that would represent an illegal quid pro quo, as federal law prohibits directly or indirectly offering any position or appointment, paid or unpaid, in exchange for favors connected with an election," Issa said Friday.

It's possible the law could be read that way, and that someone is vulnerable to a misdemeanor charge. It's also possible that the Hopium might be wearing off and my brain might be regenerating, that is, if Axelrod sucked out only my frontal lobe with a straw.

But I'm not changing what's left of my mind. Leave Obama alone on this one. The poor guy's got enough to worry about, between the oil spill, the two Koreas, Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy and immigration.

So let him relax in Chicago this Memorial Day weekend, perhaps hosting a backyard barbecue, where he can grill while wearing a "Hail to the Chef" apron, or if the Daleys come over, maybe one that says "Kiss me, I'm Irish."

Offering a spot to an ambitious young politician to protect an old servile weakling isn't new. Presidents do it, governors do it. Big-city mayors really know how to do it.

If anyone from the Obama White House is to be embarrassed or perhaps even slapped over this business, it should be Bauer for using the phrase "alternative paths to service" to gloss over a political deal to protect the quivering Specter.

But there is one scandal here. A terribly embarrassing scandal at that:

It's scandalous when a bunch of politicians from Chicago — home of patronage abuse and trained by the Daleys — recruit former President Clinton to dangle a job before a congressman and fail.

What's next? Will Emanuel stop swearing like a truck driver? Will Clinton wall himself off in a monastery?

There are plenty of other jobs they could have offered Sestak, from Water Reclamation District commissioner to city sewer inspector. These are real political jobs. The applicant does little or nothing and collects a salary and a great pension. And Axelrod and Emanuel know it.

They spent years in Chicago learning how to play. If there are two guys who know about patronage, it's these two.

Axelrod was (and still is) a mouthpiece for Mayor Richard Daley. He honed his dark arts by channeling the minds of eager and pliant journalists in Chicago to paralyze enemy candidates.

He even wrote a Tribune op-ed piece published in August 2005 extolling the virtues of ham-fisted Chicago-style political patronage, just before Daley's patronage chief was convicted and ultimately sentenced to prison.

And Emanuel, formerly the U.S. representative of Illinois' 5th Congressional District, is also a direct beneficiary of patronage. To install him in Congress, the Daleys sent him an illegal patronage army of hundreds of political workers led by the corrupt city water boss, Don Tomczak, who later went to prison.

But offering "alternative paths to service" isn't a crime in my book.

It's just old-fashioned politics. Only difference is, it's now practiced by the president who promised to transcend the broken politics of the past.